Server Restrictions and the Sense of Community
With just over one week since Aion's launch, Rynala and I hit level 23 last night. The server queues have not been a problem. We are usually able to get into the game before the queues hit. Disconnects are very infrequent. The server has went down a couple times this week but it was the first week so I guess that is to be expected. (How sad is it we just take these things as expected for MMOs?)
I have been seeing Aion getting a lot of flak from bloggers about the server queues but as I said before, I would much rather have queues for the first month than empty servers/server closures for the rest of the life cycle. Everyone knows the population will dip-be it a little or a lot-after the first month.
Tobold seems to think that we need to do away with the traditional server model of selecting a server and then putting characters on that one server. I would have to say I disagree to a point. I know games like Wizard101 and FreeRealms do not have your characters hardlocked to a server but I think the hardlocking gives a sense of community.
With your characters being locked to a server, you grow to know the other people on that server. You know who to trust, who to hunt, who to sell to and who to buy from. You know who the good guilds and who the trash guilds are. You can make a name for yourself on the server. Even with thousands of people on a server, you will still commonly run into the same people. If you break that down, now if you want to hunt a guild for PvP you will have no luck because this guild could be hiding on one of many different servers. Perhaps you want to go capture a fortress in a certain area... well if one side is defending too well one server, you could just switch to a different one and beat those people into submission. It would be a fundimental breakdown of any community building aspects of the game.
It reminds me of when cross server battlegrounds were implemented into World of Warcraft. I remember getting in the queue for a battleground and often facing some of the same people. Yes, it could get repetitive, but it also made you care more about it. Now, when you go into a cross server battleground, you are lucking to see one other random person from your server. That sense of "PvP community" is gone.
I like having a strong server community. Breaking down server boundaries diminishes that community. For a casual player not involved in server politics, I could see it not being that big of deal but for everyone else, it is somewhat nice to build up that e-reputation.